The 94rd Oscar Awards 2022: 10 nominees for Best Picture and where to see them in streaming

Valentina Premoli
StudioWhakan
Published in
8 min readMar 22, 2022

From Belfast to West Side Story, all about the favorites and surprises in the most important category: to get ready for the Oscar Night.

What will happen during the ceremony in attendance in Los Angeles, we will find out on March 27th. The host of the evening will be Regina Hall, Amy Schumer and Wanda Sykes.

The most important category: the nominees for the best picture

All important. But never as much as the candidates in the main category; The Best Film. This year, 10 are in the race: Belfast, CODA, Don’t Look Up, Drive My Car, Dune, King Richard, Licorice Pizza, Nightmare Alley, The Power of the Dog and West Side Story.

Belfast

A film directed by Kenneth Branagh

The lives of a working-class family and their young son, who grew up during the turmoil of the 1960s in the capital of Northern Ireland.

7 Nomination: Best Picture, Best Director, Best Supporting Actor, Best Supporting Actress, Best Original Screenplay, Best Original Song and Best Sound.

Stream it now: Italy, Canada, United States, United Kingdom, Spain and France

CODA

A film directed by Sian Heder

Remake of the French film La famiglia Bélier

Coda follows the life of the Rossi family, especially their daughter Ruby, a 17-year-old girl busy working on the family boat to help her parents (Jackie and Frank) and his brother (Leo), to continue their fishing business on the Massachusetts coast.

Ruby is the only hearing person in her family, since joining the high school choir, she discovers that she has a great talent for singing. Her teacher Bernardo, believes there is something special about the young teenager and pushes her to consider a prestigious conservatory for her future. Ruby will thus be faced with a difficult choice: either to abandon her parents to follow her dream or to continue helping her family.

Sian Heder distorts the formula of the typical story of adolescent growth, while not abandoning certain stereotypes and social conventions of high school life, bringing a story from the classic canon into an innovative and lovingly cared for setting. An unexpected life story to be appreciated for its emotional charge and for the messages it conveys to the public.

3 Nomination: Best Picture, Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Supporting Actor

Stream worldwide now on Apple TV

Don’t Look Up

A film directed by Adam McKay

A couple of astronomers realize the existence of a meteorite on a collision course with the Earth. The two scientists try to warn everyone on Earth that the meteor will destroy the planet in six months.

Don’t Look up is a good film, without becoming a masterpiece, it brings with it an important message that should be listened by everyone. A great cast provides great interpretations for a story that tells us nothing new, perhaps because it is too similar to what surrounds us in everyday life.

4 Nomination: Best Picture, Best Original Screenplay, Best Film Editing and Best Original Score.

Stream worldwide now on Netflix

Drive My Car

A film directed by Ryūsuke Hamaguchi

Yûsuke Kafuku, an actor and director who recently lost his wife to a brain hemorrhage, agrees to move to Hiroshima to run a theater workshop. Here, together with a company of actors and actresses who each speak their own language (Japanese, Chinese, Filipino, even sign language), works on the staging of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya. Accustomed to memorizing the text during long car journeys, Kafuku is forced to share the cockpit with a young driver: initially reluctant, little by little he enters into a relationship with the girl and, between confessions and reworking of traumas (in his past there is also the death of his daughter), he will find a new way of considering himself, his work and the world around him.

4 Nomination: Best Picture, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay and Best International Feature Film.

Stream it now: Italy, Canada, United States, United Kingdom, Spain and France

Dune

A film directed by Denis Villeneuve

In the distant future of humanity, Duke Leto Atreides accepts the stewardship of a dangerous planet, Dune, the only source of a drug capable of extending life and providing exceptional mental abilities.

10 Nomination: Best Picture, Best Cinematography, Best Costume Design, Best Production Design, Best Film Editing, Best Original Score, Best Makeup and Hairstyling, Best Sound, Best Visual Effects and Best Adapted Screenplay

Stream it now: Italy, Canada, United States, United Kingdom, Spain and France

King Richard

A film directed by Reinaldo Marcus Green

Armed with a clear vision and a bold 78-page plan, determined father and coach Richard Williams inspires his two daughters, Venus and Serena, to become tennis champions.

We are faced with a classic film structured in acts about affirmation in an adverse context, a textbook “true story” in which the impossible first becomes improbable then becomes reality. A perfect parable for a cinema that fills the soul and cannot but involve, as well as confirming the talent of a great cast.

6 Nomination: Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Supporting Actress, Best Film Editing, Best Original Song and Best Original Screenplay

Stream it now: Italy, Canada, United States, United Kingdom, Spain and France

Licorice Pizza

A film directed by Paul Thomas Anderson

The story of Alana Kane and Gary Valentine, who grow up and fall in love in the 1973 San Fernando Valley, California. The film follows their first hesitant steps on the way to love.

3 Nomination: Best Picture, Best Director and Best Original Screenplay

Stream it now: Italy, Canada, United States, United Kingdom, Spain and France

Nightmare Alley

A film directed by Guillermo del Toro

An ambitious carousel with a knack for manipulating people with a few well-chosen words begins a relationship with a psychiatrist who turns out to be even more dangerous than him.

4 Nomination: Best Picture, Best Cinematography, Best Costume Design and Best Production Design

Stream it now: Italy, Canada, United States, United Kingdom, Spain and France

The Power of the Dog

A film directed by Jane Campion

The Phil brothers (Phil and George) are completely different. Phil is cruel and frightens all the people around him. George, has a milder and more submissive character. When the latter marries the widow Rose and takes her to live on the family ranch with her son Peter, Phil goes against him and tries to hinder them with all his might; until he can no longer hide his vulnerability.

A bitter film, even if perhaps too monothematic in its eternal waiting for something that does not happen, or rather it happens but with different times and methods, without the acceleration that one would expect.
The Power of the Dog, makes us understand the barbarism of a time made of loneliness, of the dictatorship of force over empathy.

12 Nomination: Best Picture, Best Actor, 2 Best Supporting Actor, Best Supporting Actress, Best Director, Best Cinematography, Best Film Editing, Best Original Score, Best Sound, Best Production Design and Best Adapted Screenplay

Stream worldwide now on Netflix

West Side Story

A film directed by Steven Spielberg

This is not a remake. West Side Story is the 2021 film adaptation of a legendary 1957 Broadway musical, which transported the story of Romeo and Juliet to Manhattan, transforming the Veronesi Montecchi and Capulets into Jets and Sharks, two metropolitan gangs of misfits, enemies and ethnically different, the Jets, of white extraction, and the Sharks, of Puerto Rican origin. In 1961 it became a film and was a huge success, it won ten Oscars.

The film was signed by two directors: a genius of choreography and theatrical production, Jerome Robbins, and the director, Robert Wise, who did a little bit of everything but excelled above all in science fiction-horror-noir. Without taking anything away from him, the West Side Story of 1961 was above all a film by a director-choreographer.

This, on the other hand, is an author’s film. Spielberg wanted to do West Side Story and he did. He had fallen in love with it as a kid, he said, when his father brought home the record with the soundtrack and he immediately memorized the number Gee, Officer Krupke (the scene of the Jets in the police station).

After the credits, which transversely pay homage to the famous credits of Saul Bass (those were graffiti on the walls, these are imprinted on demolished facades, rusty railings, bare bricks, metal sheets, ruins, garbage), and the dedication: «To Dad».

West Side Story (1961) — Art of the Title

It is difficult to identify problems in West Side Story, Spielberg has managed to reconcile tradition and freshness in the work. The film offers a breathtaking musical and visual spectacle, capable of kidnapping the viewer to the point of making him lose the dimension of time.

7 Nomination: Best Picture, Best Director, Best Cinematography, Best Supporting Actress, Best Costume Design, Best Sound, Best Production Design

Stream it now: Italy, Canada, United States, United Kingdom, Spain and France

Which in your opinion will win Best Picture?

If you have seen any of these movies and want to say your opinion, slip it into the comments or under the dedicated post on the instagram page @studiowhakan

Thank you for reading.

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